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Agility@Scale: Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development

Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott W. Ambler and Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational level. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies. Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Disciplined Agile Delivery, Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Dr. Dobb's Journal and his company home page is ScottWAmbler.com

A common question that I keep running into with customers is whether you can take an agile approach to service oriented architecture (SOA). The quick answer is yes, because Agile is orthogonal to the implementation technologies used. You can take an agile approach developing COBOL applications running on mainframes, fat-client Java applications, multi-tier J2EE applications, and yes, even services. Granted, it's easier to do with some technologies than others, either because of the nature of the technology or because of the supporting tools.

The long answer is "yes, but". You don't adopt an SOA approach for the sheer joy of doing so, instead you very likely want to improve the level of reuse within your organization. To succeed at SOA-driven reuse you need an enterprise focus, something that doesn't appear to be very common on many agile teams. Therein lies the challenge. Several strategies for improving your chances with Agile SOA, and SOA in general, follows:1. Invest in some initial enterprise architecture modeling. You don't need to identify all of the details up front, that would take too long and actually put the effort at risk, but you do need to set a starting point to guide development teams. Identifying the technical architecture is critical, and identifying a few basic services which would provide immediate business value to one or more teams is critical. Involve people from several application project teams to ensure that you get a wide range of input. See http://www.agiledata.org/essays/enterpriseArchitecture.html for a streamlined approach to enterprise architecture modeling. Creating big, detailed models often proves to be a waste of time because development teams are rarely motivated to read mounds of documentation.2. Build out the initial infrastructure on a real application development project. This proves that your SOA strategy actually works and puts the technical foundation in place for future teams. During this period you'll be tempted to try to support several development teams, which is feasible but dramatically increases your risk. It's also tempting to focus simply on getting the infrastructure in place without delivering any business functionality, but this risks producing an ivory-tower architecture that nobody is interested in.3. Spread the service architects out onto application development teams. The people that formulated and then proved your SOA should be actively involved on the development teams that are working with it to ensure that the teams use it appropriately and to ensure that the architects get concrete feedback which they can use to evolve the architecture. When working on agile teams, these people will need to work in a collaborative and evolutionary approach just like other team members.4. Fund reuse separately. I've lost track of the number of organizations that I've run into that fail at reuse because their development teams never have the resources to develop reusable assets. That's simply the nature of the beast -- project teams will always be more interested in addressing their own specific requirements than they are in investing the time and effort to make something reusable. The real problem here is that you expect them to act differently. A better strategy is to have a separate reuse engineering team that has the resources to monitor existing projects to look for potentially reusable assets. When they find said assets this team does the work to harvest the asset, to reengineer it to make it reusable, and then to integrate back into the original source project. The goal is to make it as painless as possible to produce reusable assets such as services. If you expect project teams to do this work out of the goodness of their hearts then you're effectively punishing them when they do the right thing. That's not a very good governance strategy, IMHO.5. The reuse team now owns the asset. Any reusable asset, including services, will need to be maintained, evolved over time, and supported. This isn't free nor is it viable for project teams to do so.

If you're interested, I provide agile strategies for both enterprise architecture and strategic reuse in the book "Enterprise Unified Process". Although written under the assumption that you're taking a RUP-based approach to development, the reality is that the EUP can extend any evolutionary/agile software development process so that it addresses the larger-scale needs of modern IT organizations.